Wise men are like valuable spice for a story. They are also a wonderful plot device, or an extremely cheesy one, depending on how the character is used and written.

Wise men (and women) are often the moral compass to the main characters, or hold some kind of answer to ...

Greetings, citizens!

Superpowers coming from magical abilities or fantastic technology are essential to many stories in the fantasy and science fiction genres. They can show up in other genres, too, like horror and of course, superhero stories (are they science fiction stories? Science-Fantasy? Heroic Fantasy? Whatever - most of those folks ...

Therapists are the type of character whose occupation can easily seep into their ‘off the clock’ life. It's not something that can often be helped. Psychologists don't ‘turn off’ their perception of behavioral patterns and personality analyses, the same way you can't ‘unsee’ the rabbits after you ...

MacGuffin comin' through!


MacGuffins

I'm not sure if everyone knows this already, but a MacGuffin is a term that was made popular by Alfred Hitchcock, and is now widely used in writing and storytelling circles.

It is an item or event (or possibly even a character) that exists only ...

Emma is sick today so I'm subbing in! My topic is about art: 5 areas to work on that will help you become a better comic artist.

Practice:
The first and most important is practice. The more you do the better you get. Draw every day and try new ...

So the third and final installment in the new Disney Star Wars trilogy is out. Personally, I haven't seen it yet, mainly because the mild curiosity I have can wait until the movie hits the streaming services.

Initially, it seemed like this final installment would be met with average ...

Reflection Characters

When I was doing a little reading on the “Mentor” character type, I learned about something called “Reflection Characters”. It was an eye opener; I'd never heard of this before, though I could instantly see how it made sense in storytelling, and dozens of examples came to ...

In just three days, 2019 will be in the past!

Often this is the time to make our obligatory “resolutions list” for the year to come, usually from looking back and seeing just what we didn't achieve in the year that is ending.

Making tallies of things we need ...

With another year coming to a close and we venture forth into 2020, it’s a good time to not just catch up on some no doubt much needed rest, but also to take a moment to make some goals for the coming year. Some time ago I wrote about ...

Obviously, comics don't have sound. And that includes most webcomics.

But if you want to show music playing, or being performed, how do you indicate it on a comic page?

The first method that comes to mind is just writing the lyrics in a dialogue balloon, and maybe peppering ...